runit's a wonderful tool. Those interested in using it with ruby might want to take a look at the bunch of configurable runit services I use to reliably run several busy Rails sites: https://github.com/purcell/rails-runit
Thanks for those links, it's good to see others using runit, I'm afraid because if its lack of popularity it's been overlooked as a sysv replacement in favor of systemd, upstart, and others. Runit's maturity should be a big edge, when thinking about a replacement PID 1.
Problem is the only upstart distribution we tried (with the runit-run package in ubuntu) rendered the system unbootable. This seems to be the case with everything past Karmic.